It's not just schools that throw away food. Americans waste at least 40 percent of the food in the country each year, according to an August 2012 study by the National Resources Defense Council, on...

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Plenty of waste elsewhere, too

It's not just schools that throw away food. Americans waste at least 40 percent of the food in the country each year, according to an August 2012 study by the National Resources Defense Council, one of the country's leading environmental orgnaizations. That's the equivalent of 20 pounds of food per person, or $165 billion worth of food each year.

That's especially hurtful in a country where so many men, women and children are hungry.

“Reducing food losses by just 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million American every year, at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables,” says the NRDC, which is urging the government to study the problem and set national goals to reduce waste. The study, which traces the losses from production on farms to processing, packaging, distribution and consumption, is available at www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf.

Even as some 40 percent of all local school children can't afford three meals per day, local schools have been throwing away more nutritious food than they can count.

“The waste is awful, just awful,” says Bobbie Ercoline, a former nurse in Pine Bush Elementary School who saw unopened cartons of milk and other healthy food pile up in the garbage outside her office – an office that doubled as her school's food pantry for the district's many needy kids and families.

While food waste in the region has always been high, mid-Hudson school workers say it's soared this school year, since the implementation of a new federal law, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, has required schools to serve such nutritious food as legumes and deep-green and orange/red vegetables.

The goal of the law championed by Michelle Obama was to eradicate this sad fact of American life: one-third of all American teens are overweight or obese.

But instead of scarfing down food like kale, spinach, broccoli or whole apples, kids are often throwing it away, uneaten.

“It's a fact in most districts,” says Middletown schools Superintendent Ken Eastwood, whose district has the highest percentage of kids who need help paying for their meals, more than 74 percent. “There is significantly more waste. They're giving more types of food and kids are throwing it out.”

“The garbage cans are stuffed with corn, beans and broccoli,” adds a food-service worker in the Warwick Valley School District.

“Before the regulations, we had a different kind of waste, because kids weren't forced to take this food,” says Debra Donleavy, the former schools lunch manager in the Monticello School District, who is now an assistant food director in Pine Bush, where her job is to make healthy foods taste good.

Now, schools must offer at least one of each of the five categories of required food per day – including low-fat milk, grains or bread, a leafy green or orange/red vegetable, a fruit, and a meat or meat substitute.

For the meals to be eligible for state or federal reimbursement, kids must take at least three of the five required food groups per lunch, and one must be a fruit or vegetable.

All of which meant orange sweet potatoes in their skins instead of crispy french fries last Wednesday for the kids at Crispell Middle School in Pine Bush.

“Of course, I'd rather have stuff like the fries,” says a 13-year-old named Jenna.

In fact, so many kids in Pine Bush – and, presumably, most every other local school – want fries every day, that a 13-year-old boy named Dylan started a petition to bring them back, along with complaining to anyone who'll listen about the “too-small portions.”

So of course, it's the healthy stuff that often goes uneaten – and into the trash, or as is the case in Pine Bush, into the recycled bin.

But fear of contamination – and the prohibitive cost of transporting and refrigerating the fresh foods required in the new law – prohibit districts from saving the wasted food and donating it to the needy in this region with some 40,000 kids who must rely on free or reduced-price school meals to eat, say officials of the primary suppliers of area food banks.

“Large amounts of food does get wasted at school lunches,” says Mark Quandt, executive director of the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York. “But to get it the food bank, the cost is prohibitive,” he said.

“It's so expensive to run prepared and perishable-food programs, we stopped running them,” adds Jan Whitman, director of the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley.

And because schools must serve the healthy fresh food and won't take unused portions back because of health precautions, local food-service preparers say it's impossible to know just how much is wasted.

But in one state of Florida district with 40,000 students that studied the problem, $75,000 worth of produce was wasted last year. There are about 98,000 students in mid-Hudson schools.

“It has to be hundreds, hundreds of pounds,” Ercoline says. That's why local food-service directors are devising new ways to make kids eat as much of the nutritious food as possible – and reduce waste.

They're trying to make the healthy food tasty and convenient. So Donleavy in Pine Bush will saute leafy green spinach in garlic, and add cinnamon to apple sauce. Vonnie Hubbard, who overseas the food service in the Florida School District, cuts fruit like oranges into little pieces – after trying to tell kids that food like broccoli is good for them. Alexis Koudounas, the food-service director of the Cornwall School District also cuts an apple into little slices to make it easier for developing kids to eat.

Middletown's Eastwood says the district now uses apple sauce in its meat loaf and has switched to Boar's Head cold cuts, which saved thousands because there was less waste than the cheaper brand.

And instead of force-feeding the kids, school districts like Pine Bush try to offer choices – within the required food groups – instead of just making them eat the healthy foods, as long as the meal includes a fruit or vegetable along with that cheeseburger or turkey sandwich on whole wheat. At a recent Crispell Middle School lunch, that strategy seemed to be working, with the garbage can for recycling the organic food far less full than the one for normal lunch trash.

All of which takes a lot more work than just shoving a baloney sandwich on white bread on a kid's tray and calling it lunch.

“It could be a while before kids get used to all this,” says Hubbard, noting that many kids grew up on soda and fast food.